A Middlesex University lecturer who witnessed the 9/11 attacks has been chosen to exhibit his war themed artwork at the Imperial War Museum North.

John Timberlake, an artist and fine art lecturer at the Hendon based university, will showcase his work, Another Country XV, as part of the museum’s Catalyst: Contemporary Art and War exhibition, until February 23.

Mr Timberlake’s piece is part of his series of work, Another Country, which began with a painted backdrop of well-known Romantic landscapes by artists Turner and Constable combined with nuclear mushroom clouds, taken from sources in the IWM’s archives. 

He then constructed models with plastic spectators and photographed them together to explore ideas about landscape.

He said: “Another Country was a series of works I made between 1999 and 2001. When I started the sequence I was thinking about the Cold War as a hazy memory. 

“I made this particular piece, Another Country XV, in my Whitney Independent Study Program Studio, in Lower Manhattan in Autumn 2001, shortly after witnessing the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Centre. 

“Another Country XV still dealt with a perverse nostalgia for the Cold War threat, but it felt very much that the contexts for the depiction of war and conflict had suddenly changed.”

The IWM’s exhibition is a national collection of contemporary art produced since the first Gulf War.

The work produced by more than 40 artists includes photography, film, sculpture, oil paintings and prints.